The Mississippi squirrel

About twenty years after Ray Stevens wrote “Mississippi Squirrel Revival,” something very similar actually happened.
The famous song told about visiting Mississippi and experiencing “the day the squirrel went berserk in the First Self-Righteous Church in that sleepy little town of Pascagoula.”
Ironically, a squirrel really did go berserk in the First Baptist Church in the sleepy little town of Poplarville. Although it does not rhyme with “hallelujah,” Poplarville and Pascagoula are both in south Mississippi, and since Poplarville, with 2,500 residents, is about ten times smaller than Pascagoula, it well qualifies as a sleepy town. And what happened there made Ray Stevens sound like a prophet.
I was pastor of First Baptist Church of Poplarville from 1991 to 1999. A few months before I moved to Georgia, we were having problems with squirrels around the church. One day a deacon and I chased one into the choir room, where he purchased his freedom by flying out of the window and landing on the street two stories below. On another occasion, a squirrel got in a transformer and sacrificed its life to put the church in the dark.
After I moved to Georgia, Butch Knight became pastor of the church in Poplarville.
During Brother Butch’s ministry, Poplarville had “The Great Squirrel Incident.” He says that it all began on a Sunday morning in January 2002, about three minutes before the beginning of the worship service. The pastor noticed several choir members standing up and looking at something. Then he heard a scream, and he saw a squirrel leap up on top of the grand piano. His bushy tail waved, and he held his little hands in front of himself, as if he was greeting the congregation.
The men of the church went after him, taking off their suit coats and sport coats, and throwing them at the squirrel, with no thought that if they captured the squirrel, he might shred their expensive coats to pieces.
The squirrel started making laps in front of the choir loft, trying to escape. One man in the choir aimed the deadliest missile he could find at the squirrel: a hymnal. As it missed the creature with a loud thud, the pastor wondered how he was going to tell his children’s sermon on the sacredness of life by explaining why they killed a squirrel in church.
Then the squirrel ran up the American flag pole. Next, he ran across the front of the church, and ran up the Christian flag pole. Since the men were trying to throw their coats over him, he high-tailed it toward the back of the church, running under pews. Although the pastor could not see the creature, he could tell where he was, because it looked like the congregation was doing the wave as people were jumping pews and shouting from the front pew to the back. Some people were laughing and saying aloud, “Are we in Pascagoula?” (Do I hear a hallelujah?)
At one point, the squirrel ran back into the grand piano, and they closed the lid, trapping him inside. But how could they have church with him inside the piano? So they let him out and he fled again.
At last, a fellow wearing a winter coat managed to throw it over the squirrel. The darkness inside the coat calmed the squirrel, and he grew still. The man was able to take him outside and set him free. The pastor looked at his watch. It was 11:15, and they had spent 18 minutes chasing a varmint in church.
Did the church break out in revival, as in the Ray Stevens song? Brother Butch says they mostly broke out in laughter. But since some folks were going through difficult times, it was what they needed at the time.
Some time later, the church secretary’s 9-year-old son was playing at the church, and he chased a squirrel into the worship center, where it perched on top of the flag pole. It was a weekday, not a Sunday, and nobody was there except the boy and the squirrel. The boy picked up a rubber ball, and managed to hit the squirrel on the nose. The animal fell to the floor, motionless. The little boy felt terrible, but it was too late-- the squirrel was stone dead.
Whether or not the squirrel that died that day was the same squirrel that went berserk in a Sunday service, nobody will ever know. But I do know this: you can run wild for a time, but eventually you die. The Bible says that we’re all destined to live, die, and face Judgment Day (Hebrews 9:27). As Amos 4:12 says, “prepare to meet your God.”
So if your life is going nuts, take a lesson from a squirrel. Trust in Jesus to save you from sin, and you’ll be ready for whatever life throws at you. And when that happens, your fight for survival will break out in revival, and you’ll shout “hallelujah.”
Copyright 2006 by Bob Rogers

The Unity Candle Crisis

The month of June is known as the beginning of the hurricane season and the height of the wedding season (not that the two are necessarily related).
One wedding that I conducted, while not stormy. was nearly disunified.
The bride had already come down the aisle. The vows had begun. However, the wedding director was horrified, because the unity candle had not been prepared.
If you are not familiar with a unity candle, it is a candelabra with a large center candle and two smaller candles on each side. The custom is for the bride's mother and groom's mother to light each of the smaller candles before the service. After the bride and groom exchange vows and rings, they use the two small candles to light the large center candle, representing the coming together of two families to make one. The only problem was that the two smaller candles were not lit before the service began.
The wedding director had little time to decide what to do. Plan A would be to walk up to the candelabra, which was beside the minister, and say to the wedding party, "Excuse me, could you pause right there at 'for better or worse' and let me light these candles before things do get worse?" No, she decided that plan A was too much of a distraction.
So she activated plan B.
The wedding director grabbed a candle lighter and ran upstairs to the second floor level behind the pulpit area, looking for an entrance to the choir loft. Since this was not her home church, she was not familiar with the building. Several times she opened doors to closets. She could hear the vows continue, and she knew that if she did not hurry, soon the couple would be up a candle without a lighter. Finally, she found a door from the second floor to the stairway that descended to the choir loft. She descended the stairs and slowly opened the door to the choir loft and motioned to the photographer. He was sitting on the floor behind the choir railing, taking pictures by a remote control of various cameras that he was monitoring. He was out of view of the congregation, but he was right there on the other side of the choir railing from the unity candle.
The photographer turned white as a sheet when he saw a woman lying on her stomach, peering out of a crack in the door to the choir loft, poking a stick at him. But he caught on quickly.
I was unaware that any of this was going on. All I remember is that as the groom was placing the ring on the bride's finger, out of the corner of my left eye I noticed a person rise up from behind the choir railing, light each of the two side candles, and then disappear again behind the choir railing. I didn't even know there was a crisis, but the photographer came to the rescue, just in the nick of time!
God likes to show up just in time. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, God waited until their feet were in the water before He opened dry ground before them (Joshua 3:15-16). Even Jesus Himself showed up just in time. The Bible says, "But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman..." (Galatians 4:4, New Living Translation). God is always on time; He's never too early and never too late. Isn't it time that you trusted in Him?
Copyright 2007 by Bob Rogers.